Oculus Rift Virtual Campus Tour of Bowie State University

Current Students: Pranay Rajeev, Dexter Ballerda and Phillip Devreaux

Status: Current

Our current application shows virtual online campus tour using oculus rift head mounted displays. The BSU university campus 3D environment is designed for oculus rift head mounted display to give the user a complete immersive feeling of the campus. Our developed 3D model was converted to an oculus prefab by adding the oculus prefabs and scripts on top of the player. This allows the player to navigate in the campus environment and have the sense of presence. While adding the player to the campus environment scene the default camera was replaced with the oculus rift camera prefab. The left part of the screen will be the left eye’s view and right part will be the right eye’s view while wearing the oculus rift.

These virtual campus tours can be helpful to understand the campus environment and better know about the university campus leaving the users no stress of walking or coming to campus just to view the campus. We hope our contribution helps in developing the virtual reality campus environment systems.

We have extended the project to perform virtual evacuation drills in the immersive collaborative virtual reality environment developed for Bowie State University Campus. Immersive collaborative virtual reality environment also offers a unique way for training in the emergencies for campus safety. The participants can enter the collaborative virtual reality environment setup on the cloud and participate in the evacuation drill or a tour which leads to considerable cost advantages over large scale real life exercises. This project presents an experimental design approach to gather data on human behavior and emergency response in a university campus environment among a set of players in an immersive virtual reality environment using occulus rift.